Category Archives: News

July, 2015: Physicists in the McEuen research group use the principles of kirigami to manipulate graphene, laying the groundwork for future nano-machines. Both Co-Directors of KIC, Paul McEuen and David Muller, contributed to the July article in Nature. Read more and see videos of the graphene kirigami in action in the Cornell Chronicle.

July, 2015: Trapping vortices key to high-current superconductors. KIC member Seamus Davis and researchers from Cornell, Brookhaven and Argonne national laboratories have found that irradiation can create nanometer-sized defects that trap swirling eddies in the flow of electrons, keeping them out of the way so more current can flow. They reported their discovery in the May […]

June, 2015: Uyen Nguyen’s origami art is part of a VOGEL collection that features creased textiles. For info on the collection see https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/send-vogel-to-vancouver-fashion-week–3#/story. Nguyen works in KIC member Itai Cohen‘s research group studying the mechanical properties of Origami and designing materials with tailored mechanical properties. Read more in the Aug. 4th Cornell Chronicle article.

June, 2015: Cornell chemist and KIC member Jiwoong Park has received a Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award. The highly competitive program supports research teams working in more than one traditional science or engineering discipline to accelerate breakthroughs in basic research. Read more in the Cornell Chronicle.

April, 2015: Cornell Chemistry Professor and KIC member Jiwoong Park has demonstrated a way to create a new kind of semiconductor thin film that retains its electrical properties even when it is just atoms thick. Read more about the Park group growth technique for molybdenum disulfide in the Cornell Chronicle.

April 2015: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has named three Cornell faculty members, including KIC Director Paul McEuen, among its 197 new fellows for 2015. The fellows are among “The world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists and civic, business and philanthropic leaders.” Read more in the Cornell Chronicle.

March 2015: Postdoctoral fellow Tsevi Beatus, working with KIC member Itai Cohen, associate professor of physics, and John Guckenheimer, professor of mathematics, have discovered that flies stabilize themselves during flight using a control reflex that’s among the fastest in the animal kingdom. Their results were published March 11 in Royal Society Interface. Read more in […]

March, 2015: KIC Member Itai Cohen and his research group have found that the square twist origami fold produces a distinct snapping between folded and unfolded states, like a light switch. By applying this to a gel polymer the isize of a speck of dust, they are developing the foundation for origami-inspired materials and microscopic machines. Read more […]

February, 2015: KIC Member Kyle Shen‘s group offers insight on how different “knobs” can change material properties in ways that were previously unexplored or misunderstood. Studying strontium iridate the researchers were able to flip it from behaving like metal to a semiconductor by applying spin-orbit interactions or changing molecular bond angles. Read more in the […]

February 2015: A first-of-its-kind electron microscope, which will allow materials to be studied in their natural environments using an electron beam focused down to a subatomic spot, is coming to Cornell. An NSF grant was awarded to an interdisciplinary team led by KIC member Lena F. Kourkoutis. Read more in the Cornell Chronicle.

To better understand topological insulators (TIs) and why they weren’t living up to their potential Seamus Davis’s group at Cornell and Brookhaven National Lab studied them with their scanning tunneling microscope. What they found is the magnetic disorder at the surface was preventing the smooth flow of electrons. Read more in the Chronicle and their Feb 3 […]

January, 2015: The directors of three Kavli nanoscience institutes – Paul Alivisatos, Paul McEuen, and Nai-Cheng Yeh-discuss what makes the nanoscale so important, the field’s grand challenges, safety challenges, and their thoughts on funding, training and the future. Their discussion highlights can be found on the Kavli Foundation website.

January, 2015: KIC member J.C. Seamus Davis teams up with Eun-Ah Kim to isolate a ‘fingerprint’ that identifies specific fluctuations in electrons that force them into pairs, causing their host material to make way for free-flowing, resistance-free electron pairs. Their findings were published in Nature Physics. Read more about this work in the Cornell Chronicle.

December, 2014: John Heron, a postdoc in KIC members Dan Ralph and Darrell Schlom’s research groups, has made a breakthrough in room-temperature magnetoelectric memory device. Read more in: The Chronicle, and Nature: News and Views Full article in Nature.

October, 2014: Curious Stardust, the new Kavli blog, is comprised of a team of scientists from 11 Kavli Institutes reflecting on work in and around astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience. Read more about the new Kavli blog on the Kavli Foundation website.